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Queen cell size

Was in my hives today to remove some grafts and make some splits. I was getting into one hive to get some brood and found 6-9 queen cells that were made in preparation of swarming. Lucky enough I caught them before any had hatched (some still had not been capped) so I decided to split this hive up and use all the queen cells for my splits instead of using my grafts. The reason I did this was because the queen cells made in preparation for swarming were so much bigger as almost as much as twice the size of my grafts. Why is this and how do I get my grafted cells to look like this? Or is that even possible because of the difference in forcing queen rearing on a hive versus the hive queen rearing naturally.

Re: Queen cell size

Originally Posted by Mountain Bee

Or is that even possible because of the difference in forcing queen rearing on a hive versus the hive queen rearing naturally.

Depends on the cell building colony. Is yours set up like that boomer about to swarm, or is it a made up starter/finisher with nurse bees added from other colonies? If you were to build a powerful colony with 12-15 frames of brood and full of young bees, and use that for your cell builder, you would get cells very much the equal of those in your strong colony with swarm cells.

Re: Queen cell size

I discovered that I obtained quite large cells if I first kept a frame containing very young larvae (those being fed royal jelly), overnight. Just before adding the grafts, I would remove the frame of brood from the cell builder, shaking all those nurse bees back into the cell builder. My theory was the nurse bees were stimulated to produce maximum RJ to feed the larvae, then only had the queen cells (grafts) as a place to deposit that RJ.